"You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression"

Look at the current text menu of FreeBSD's bootloader, look at the old-fashioned ASCII logo. FreeBSD aims to support the most modern hardware platforms, to implement the latest protocols and greatest algorithms. Do you think it's appropriate that FreeBSD greets its users with a boot screen that looks like a 20 years old DOS program?

That's why I'm working on this:

Graphics support for /boot/loader

Lets start with a screenshot (this one is not completely up-to-date, current WIP looks a bit different):

New themes can easily be created. It is expected that the base system will ship only with a limited number of themes (maybe just one), and more themes can be provided through the ports collection.

If a theme wants to do more sophisticated things, such as using multiple graphics files or fonts, or re-arrange the menu in completely different ways, it will have to bring its own Forth code and modify beastie.4th directly (an appropriate mechanism to provide hooks into may be provided at a later time).

Work in progress

Note this is currently work in progress, happening in the FreeBSD Perforce ("p4") repository. I plan to commit it to FreeBSD when it's ready, after proper review and approval.

For those you are eager to check out the WIP, there's a tarball available for preliminary testing. Please see the testing instructionsfor details. Note this is "bleeding edge", so it might not work for you.